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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 7581511" data-attributes="member: 29398">Yeah, same here, but "hero" as a generic term meaning "the later stages of protagonist development" is a lot shorter to type! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I wonder if he was more surprised by things he found in his research, than by what he wrote using it.  Guess we'll never know.To me-as-player the observer part comes later, when I read the game log.  To me-as-DM the observer part comes both during play and then later when I write the game log.Yes...except for this...Not just as a DM; this sort of thing would bug the hell out of me as a player as well because I'd still be asking the same question: does something only just now being learned or introduced, that in theory was present all along, possibly cause any retcons or change any previously-done actions and-or roleplay?Which also means that were I playing in a situation where players could introduce major elements of the fiction, one top-of-mind consideration for me would always be whether anything I was planning on introducing on the fly would cause these same issues - an example being the "my PC is a high noble" declaration - and if it would I wouldn't introduce it.Huge red flag goes up the second someone says "Had we known this earlier {xxx} would have been done differently!", where what's just now been revealed is something that should have been known earlier.  The noble isn't the best example here as there may be valid reasons to have kept it secret (though the noble PC's player and the GM should still have known all along), so I'll use an example that happened to me way back when:A friend was writing an adventure module - great big thing - and I was DMing it kind of as it got written*.  Party is out in the wilderness following a road (the only road in the area) to an important assassin's hideaway.  Eventually it comes out in the module that the assassins use wagons to get their supplies in from civilization - and on hearing this the players quite rightly ask me "Well, why didn't we see any wagon tracks in the dirt, all the way along the road?  Things might have been different if we had!".  The meta-game answer, which I openly told the players, was that the wagons hadn't yet been written into the module at the time and so I couldn't read ahead and factor them in.  They were understanding, if a bit annoyed, and on we went; but it stuck with me as something both as player and DM to watch out for and never to repeat.* - at one point about halfway through I told my friend he'd better do some serious writing that coming week, as the previous session had played to within 9 words (!) of where he'd left off writing!</blockquote>

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